Scorched earth: High Park Fire might be blessing for wildlife, opportunity for science

The worst of the High Park Fire's environmental consequences may already be history, experts say.

Nov. 20, 2012

Leftover wattles and bails of agricultural straw sit Friday by a road in the High Park Fire burn area above Red Stone Canyon at Bob Reichert's property. Volunteers spread the straw in a drainage area to help stabilize the soil and prevent erosion from stormwater runoff. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

Bails of agricultural are ready to be spread Friday on the slopes above Red Stone Canyon on Bob Reichert's property. Volunteers spread the straw in an effort to help stabilize the soil and prevent erosion from stormwater runoff after the High Park Fire burned the area. / V. Richard Haro/The Coloradoan

More online and coming later this week

Coming Thursday, Sarah Jane Kyle reports on the state of long-term fire victim relief efforts. See more stories on the High Park Fire six months later at www.Coloradoan.com/HighParkFire.

REDSTONE CANYON — — The drive up to Bob Reichert’s property high in the hills above Redstone Canyon is a lesson in both the destructive powers of wildfire and the resiliency of nature following the worst blaze Northern Colorado has ever seen.

Reichert owns property scorched in some places by the High Park Fire to the point where everything living was incinerated to black ash and the remains of the charred young trees have begun to droop toward the ground. The trunks of older trees are completely burned through.

Other slopes at lower elevations were burned, but nature has restored the hillsides to the point where you have to look hard to see where the High Park Fire roared through.

Now, armed with bales of hay and “wattles,” mesh tubes of hay designed to contain water rushing off of slopes, volunteers are trying to speed up nature’s restoration work.

More than 400 people lending a helping hand with the Wildlands Restoration Volunteers have helped restore bits and pieces of Reichert’s property over the last several months, spreading hay and hay bales on the burned forest floor to prevent soil erosion, reduce runoff and allow new plants to take hold on the steep, blackened slopes.

“In these dense forest areas what we’re seeing is that it has charred all these deep, decades of leaf litter, pine needles and twigs down to bare ground,” said John Giordanengo, Northern Colorado regional director for WLRV. “The impacts that has on the watershed is extraordinary. We’re expecting in a lot of these areas a 600 percent, 700 percent increase in runoff.”

During major rainstorms after the fire, the rain washed off the burn area’s slopes, carrying ash, mud, debris and soil with it into the streams below and, eventually, into the Poudre River.

The impact was immediate and clear to anyone who found themselves stuck between mudslides on Colorado Highway 14: The Poudre River ran like black asphalt, the river’s side gulches filled with silt, and streams of water and mud formed on hillsides where no such streams existed before the fire.

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Time

The High Park Fire’s overall environmental toll in the foothills may seem obvious when looking at the scorched earth in the most severely burned areas. But the breadth and depth of the wildfire’s impact may only be revealed by years of healing as scientists take a close look at what changes were forced upon the foothills.

“The most visible impact is still the river,” said Tony Cheng, director of the Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University.

The Poudre River — one of two sources of water for the city of Fort Collins — still has thick layers of ash and debris caked on its shores and runs black during rainstorms.

Eventually, the river will heal. But how the forest heals is another question entirely.

“What we know from some of the more recent fires, there hasn’t been hardly any tree growth in those areas that burned with high severity,” Cheng said. “The longest-term effect on the forest is, in those areas where so many mature trees have been burned, there’s no seed source for the next forest. The question is what impact that’s going to cause.”

Only time will reveal how the forest will heal.

Many severely burned areas where the trees were almost completely incinerated are likely to remain treeless for quite some time, Cheng said.

“A lot of those areas are not visible from Highway 14,” he said.

Aspen trees, almost always pioneers in scorched forests, will begin to shoot up in a few years, but the ponderosa pine trees will take a while. Where lodgepole pines grow at higher elevations, fire is a necessity for reproduction, and young trees could be seen flourishing in three to five years, Cheng said.

The forest in the wake of the fire may look devastated to passersby, but to wildlife, the fire did some good and some bad, said Colorado Parks and Wildlife biologist Mark Vieira.

The fire improved lodgepole and ponderosa pine habitat for big game species, opening up the forest for animals that had been closed out by its density, he said.

These species evolved with wildfire and they’re easily able to adjust to woodlands recently burned, he said.

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“We haven’t seen any population-level effects,” he said.

Though areas severely scorched by the fire have little or no nutritional value for wildlife, “those trees are still providing security cover,” Vieira said.

Measuring the impact

The changes the High Park Fire is forcing upon Larimer County’s forest ecosystems have become an opportunity for scientists who have turned some of the burn area into a living laboratory documenting forest recovery.

Volunteers, the U.S. Forest Service and private landowners are actively working on restoration projects throughout the burn area, but one area they’re not touching is the Cache la Poudre Wilderness, which is entirely within the burn area.

Roosevelt National Forest officials have decided to let nature take its course in the wilderness area in lieu of stabilizing slopes with seed and mulch.

“Wilderness is established so that the forces of nature can do their work,” said Kevin Cannon, wilderness and trails coordinator for the Canyon Lakes Ranger District. “Wilderness is also a research area in a way that allows us to see what happens after fire.”

One of the researchers working in the wilderness is Lee MacDonald, a professor of watershed stewardship at CSU, who is studying how much erosion is occurring in the burn area and what the sediment production rates are in the Poudre River watershed.

CSU and MacDonald’s team received a grant from the National Science Foundation to fly a special airplane over his study area to retrieve data about erosion and charred soil once each year.

“I think we have to say the High Park Fire is not like the (2002) Hayman Fire,” because only 15 percent of the High Park Fire burned at high severity. About 40 percent of the Hayman Fire southwest of Denver burned severely.

“This fire was much more patchy,” and the moderately burned areas will recover more quickly, he said.

The Hayman Fire recovery period was much longer than what scientists are expecting with the High Park Fire, partly because of the kind of soil that exists in the foothills west of Fort Collins.

The soils in the Hayman Fire burn area are like sand, and organic matter is generally absent, said Deb Entwistle, Canyon Lakes Ranger District hydrologist.

“Up here, there’s a lot more organic matter and (it’s) less erosive,” allowing vegetation to grow back more quickly, she said.

With the wet July that followed the worst of the High Park Fire, MacDonald said the long-term impact of the High Park Fire may not be anything like the Hayman Fire, which caused problems for Denver’s water system for many years.

“The majority of the ash has washed off at this point and blown away,” he said. “I don’t think we’re going to get nearly as much black in the rivers as we did last year.”

The flooding Poudre Canyon saw in July and August won’t likely be as severe next summer because the forest’s recovery will have advanced significantly by then, he said.